As the electric vehicle market grows, the Guam Power Authority is getting ahead of the game to make the most out of its benefits to both drivers and the power grid. Big changes are coming as the agency takes the first steps to expand, control and manage EV charging.

“The goal is to try having people charge during the daytime rather than going home and plugging in. Because if you have a lot of EVs plugging in all at once at night, then that’s going to increase our peak and eventually it could result in us having to put in more generation,” explained John Cruz, GPA’s Engineering and Technical Services assistant general manager.

GPA was recently picked for a US Department of Energy program where they will receive up to $1 million of comprehensive technical assistance for GPA’s emerging EV Managed Charging Services Program.

The assistance is to support the planning and deployment of vehicle-grid integration technologies (VGI). Simply put, VGI is when electric vehicles (EVs) interact with the power grid and prevent it from overloading.

GPA needs to increase loads during the day to use the ample solar PV power produced during the day. Cruz said moving EV vehicle charging to daylight hours is a key strategy for the agency.

“We have a bunch of solar PV that’s coming out under phase four. So the more loads we can push out to the daytime hours when the solar PVs are producing, the less batteries that we need to put out,” Cruz said.

EVs work as backup batteries for the grid, helping to balance it during peak hours. To get things rolling, they recently purchased 25 electric school buses.

“Those have large batteries so they’re probably easier targets to use for Vehicle to Grid. So during portions of the day while they’re sitting there charging, we could use the batteries to actually provide grid power whenever we have capacity issues,” Cruz said.

GPA also plans to install four EV charging stations at the Gloria B. Nelson Public Service Building in Mangilao for public use.

He said there is currently a “bank of chargers” in the employee parking lot. They also have a construction project to provide a total of 20 charging stations at the facility.

“Additionally, the EV chargers that we will be providing have something called a load management capability. That means it will restrict the charging so it will limit the demand– the power demand from the chargers,” he explained. “So say you’re in the middle of our peak and you have five people on a charging station and each of them is charging a car. Well during the peak time, we will limit the amount of power that EV charger will put out so you will be charging more slowly, but you wouldn’t be putting more stress on the grid.”

Their strategy, through their EV Managed Charging Program, is to partner up with infrastructure partners and set up a Steering Committee comprised of the dealerships that sell electric vehicles.

“Then we would work with the partners and committee to start installing public access to EV chargers throughout the island,” Cruz said.

He says there are already “a bunch” of EVs on Guam and the industry is only expected to grow.

“We were kind of surprised a few years ago when we went out to do a survey and research on how many EVs are on the island. We found out that there were 30 Tesla vehicles. There’s no Tesla support on the island, but there are certainly a lot of Teslas being brought to the island and being used, and they were using level one chargers which is slow charging at home. So this will benefit a lot of people so they can charge during the day, help us eat up all of that nice solar PV energy, and prevent the growth of the peak so we don’t have to put in new generation.”

Putting in new generation could mean an additional charge for customers. GPA Management Analyst III Laurie Tumaneng said it’s why they applied for the technical assistance grant.

“We don’t want to reach a point where we are able to put in the new infrastructure where we are able to tap into the new technology, but there’s just too many cars or we’re just not ready yet or the infrastructure would be just more expensive for us to put in,” Tumaneng explained. “So we’re hoping, from this technical assistance, that we get schedules. If we wanted to go into the direction of V2G or bidirectional charging, this would be the ideal timeline for us to do it.”

She said getting a head start now will paint a picture of the kind of investment they need to make in the front end to see the results later on down the line.

“So get ahead of the game, control these chargers and manage them so that we can get the full benefits of EVs without any of the effects that could affect the grid, affect our customers’ pocket books,” Cruz added.